AGRODEP seeks to bring together dispersed and disparate statistical, economic, and geo-spatial data from Africa in one central Web data portal. It links existing key data sources, complements them as necessary, and develops shared standards, formats, and exchange protocols that facilitate access by Consortium members to high quality and consistent datasets. AGRODEP also provides data quality checking and certification.

A major goal of AGRODEP is to facilitate access to databases or portions of databases that are otherwise not easily accessible to individual researchers due to costs and/or access restrictions. It will cover the types of data that are used for economic analysis and policy research related to growth and development in Africa. These include national agricultural statistics, household survey data, social accounting matrices, food supplies and balances, national accounts, macroeconomic data, bilateral trade data, market access data, transport costs, migration data, geo-spatial data, and various development indicators.

AGRODEP makes available IFPRI's significant database of national social accounting matrices (SAMs) for African countries, which have been collected over many years. We include the most recent SAM available for a particular country. Many of the country SAMs may be downloaded from the IFPRI website through IFPRI Dataverse and can be used to study, for instance, distributional, fiscal, and/or tax policy issues.

Similarly, AGRODEP provides links to African surveys and datasets that are housed in the World Bank's Microdata Library. The majority of these datasets are household surveys, but there are a number of datasets at the firm and national level. The surveys cover a wide variety of topics include health, remittances, and investment climate.